The Sun Burns Cold

Sometimes I think, you know, I’m forty years old…and I’m like the guy who’s saying some shit like “I work in a kitchen six days a week, but I’m a hardcore punk rock fan all the time.” I mean, seriously-do I really identify with my habits of consumption like that?

I think about it, and I haven’t been in a band for years and years, and though I’m putting out a new issue of my ‘zine I still am really divorced from any kind of scene fucking anywhere.

But, you know, it’s still important that I identify as a punk rock type or whatever. Cause for some fucked up reason that shit matters to me, when actually it matters about as much as identifying as a hippie or rockabilly fan did in the 1980′s.

Basically it don’t mean shit.

And it’s kind of fucked up, I mean when you look at yourself and realize you’ve built an identity around what you dig, or even what you’re into doing. Because whatever you’re doing, whatever hobby-like for me, writing or blogging or photography-it’s all ensnared in the matrix of consumption. You purchase stuff to read and get inspired to write, you buy a blog domain or camera, and then you produce your own thing-or maybe you were doing it all along but you still have to consume so much to create so much.

It’s inescapable, or nearly so. Of course the best things in life are always free. We’ll see writing that makes us want to write, and if we’re lucky it won’t be attached to a sales brochure or pay-for-service site. We’ll see images, maybe even without the obscenity of glaring profit motivated watermarks, that make us want to go out and take pictures. We’ll hear music that makes us want to pick up an instrument whether we can play that shit or not.

However it’s getting more and more rare as everything, from your Facebook status posts to helping your neighbor weed her garden, is monetized.

How much are you worth? How much is your time worth? Put a price tag on that shit and sell it, right? Cause we all gotta get paid. We all gotta be micro capitalists while the fat cats fuck us all over year after year. We all gotta play the game, right? But we’re not really like them, we tell ourselves. We’re just trying to pay the bills. Just trying to come up in a shitty economy. A shitty economy that depends on our out and out complicity but never mind all that.

We’re just playing along, just doing what everybody else does. Cause if we dont get ahead some other motherfucker will and we’ll be left to the hindmost.

And I realize, I aint never going to be an internet millionaire celebrity blogger-and I aint never going to have a “popular” blogsite featured on WordPress front page or same shit-and it’s like back in the day when punk actually meant something, and you could get a mouthful of jocko homo fist for being a “freak” or “weirdo”, when choosing to not play along by the rules and social mores was something a motherfucker could be proud of…it just seems sort of the same way out here now in cyberia.

Thus, I’m happy to offer all of the content on this blog for absolutely fucking free-if you want, steal the shit out of any of it. Not only will I take it as the ultimate compliment, but I would hope that it would spur you to go make stuff of your own for the simple sake of just fucking doing it.

Thus if you want free copies of my ebooks and whatever other shit I can stuff in an email hit me up at davegurz(dot)gmail(dot)com. And if you send me a land addy I’ll send you my ‘zine and some stuff by post.

And I guess that’s why I still identify as a goddam punk rock type.